I had recently written an article on how brands no longer have to rely on social media handles, to do great social media campaigns. I have also been going through a lot of trends & forecasting for the coming years and one aspect, which stood out for me, was the Return of Owned assets.
Yes, you heard it right, owned assets starting with a brand website, SEO & content. Over the past couple of years, the focus on websites & SEO had slowly tapered down. I have had conversation with brands who do not believe is SEO anymore. However, content has been the key buzz for a long time, with brand spending money on creating/curating as well as pushing content on social platform. This is set to change. With ever increasing push from Facebook & other platforms to increase their top line, it can be assumed that return on investment on your content will be zero unless we find alternatives to publish it.
Another phrase which became popular over the years was HERO HUB HYGIENE, which originated as a Youtube content framework. Brands lapped up this framework for their storytelling needs, and started creating or curating content in bulk. They also pushed this content. The question then is, What Now?. How can a new user find an old content or a user who was exposed to the content once expected to go back to the content again? In other words, where is your actual hub for content? It cant be scattered across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. These platforms were created to tell their stories & not your stories in the first place.
Smart marketers will wake up to this reality and start creating hubs. It can be part of the current website or if one is redesigning the website, then due merit or weightage needs to be given in creating a hub for the content which has been created over the years. Business that you are losing everyday because you have not served your website to someone who searched for a piece of content that you have already created is huge.
Imagine how this will impact your inbound marketing via SEO. Let us say that you have created 200 pieces of content in the last 2 years. That’s easily an opportunity to create 200 more pages on the website, optimize over 200 keywords for the brands, and simply create a credible brand story on Google, which is still the #1 destination to start a brand research.
Gone will be the days of creating multiple microsites in a year under different names. Everything should be created under one head so that there is unification of all your digital marketing efforts rather than fragmentation, which is leading to wastage of over 40% of your digital marketing efforts.
